What's so special about the British rap pack?

It used to be an embarrassment for the record industry. Now British rap is riding high with Dizzee, Tinchy, Tinie, Professor Green and Rizzle Kicks topping the charts. Even Simon Cowell is getting in on the act. Alexis Petridis reports

Top of the pops: Rizzle Kicks' Harley Alexander-Sule and Jordan Stephens. Photograph: Finn Taylor for the Guardian

It's mid-afternoon, six hours before the gig is scheduled to take place, and the teenage girls have already started to assemble on the pavement outside London's Roundhouse. They peer in at the two 19-year-olds sitting with their backs to the window. Jordan Stephens and Harley Alexander-Sule exude nonchalance; impressive given that, not so long ago, Rizzle Kicks were performing to an audience of three in their home town of Brighton. Stephens shrugs – this is nothing, he says, compared with something called Ladies' Night, organised by a local radio station in Leeds: "Scariest gig we've ever done – 3,000 tickets sold. Performing in a shopping centre. Purely females. We had to walk down an escalator to get to the stage."

"After we'd performed, people chased us up the escalator," says the implausibly handsome Alexander-Sule. "A group of five girls came up to us and started crying."

And so began Rizzle Kicks' ongoing crash course in pop stardom. Over the past three months, they've recorded a debut album with, among others, Fatboy Slim producing, had their first top 10 hit and their first No 1, albeit as featured artists on a single by X Factor runner-up Olly Murs. "The guy's got a huge fanbase," Stephens says when I suggest that appearing on a Murs single seems a risky thing for a rap duo to do. "If the tune was, like, proper shit, and I had to say stuff that idiots could understand, then yeah, there'd be a problem. But the only thing holding us back was what people would think. And the fact that even entered our minds pissed me off, so I was like, 'Let's do it.'"

For Stephens at least, their success has come as a relief: "I always feel really responsible for Harls," he says, looking at his partner, who does seem noticeably quieter and more thoughtful. "He definitely would have been talented enough to go to stage school. But I was like, 'Just do music.' I thought, if this doesn't work, I've kind of fucked up his whole life."

Perhaps he shouldn't have worried. Rizzle Kicks look about as close to a guaranteed success as pop gets in 2011. In fact, they look like the apotheosis of British pop music in 2011: they're young, good-looking, they're unencumbered by worries about credibility and, most importantly, they rap. British rappers currently dominate the pop charts in a way that would have seemed unimaginable a few years ago. This year alone, Example has had two No 1 singles and a No 1 album; his next London show is at the capital's biggest venue, the O2 Arena. Wretch 32 has had three top five hits, one of them a No 1. Tinchy Stryder has reached the top five for the fourth time, with Spaceship, while his collaborator on that single, Dappy, has also had a No 1. Tinie Tempah is about to embark on a sold-out arena tour: his album Disc-Overy has gone double platinum; he's won two Brits and an Ivor Novello award for his single Pass Out, also platinum. The day before I speak to him, Professor Green turns up promoting his current single, Read All About It, on the biggest TV show in Britain, The X Factor.

"How do I end up on X Factor?" he laughs, although it's perhaps worth noting that British rap even seems to have infected the realm of Simon Cowell. The judge who replaced Cheryl Cole was Tulisa Contostavlos who, with Dappy, was formerly in the pop hip-hop trio N-Dubz. Last year's runner-up, Cher Lloyd, was a rapper; this year's favourite, Misha B, raps as well. "Yeah," Professor Green says, "it's something they feel they almost have to do now, isn't it?"

All this success, and yet what's striking about the rappers I speak to is how little commercial ambition they had. Wretch 32's idea of a big gig was to play at the 350-capacity Jazz Cafe in Camden, north London: "You don't want to give yourself big hopes and end up heartbroken." Professor Green considered rapping just a hobby. "I was already wrapped up in things that I took more seriously," he says. Even when he started releasing records, Tinchy Stryder says, he "never thought about being in the mainstream". "We just thought it was good to put out our own stuff. I didn't think, like, getting in the Top 20 was for us."

You can understand their refusal to get their hopes up. For decades, UK rap was a byword for failure of one kind or another. The best an artist could hope for was a novelty hit or two, followed by a plunge into obscurity – such was the fate of MC Tunes, the late Derek B and Rebel MC – or a life of critical acclaim and negligible sales.

Early on in their career, Rizzle Kicks met underground British rapper Blade, legendary both for the quality of his work and the fact that he was once reduced to stopping passersby on the street and trying to sell them his albums from a suitcase. He flatly told Rizzle Kicks not to bother. "He was sitting there, like, 'I was on the dole for five years. I used to just eat pasta and water. Don't do music! Don't do it! It's shit!'" Stephens says.

There was a brief moment in the early noughties when things appeared to be changing. Ms Dynamite and Dizzee Rascal both won the Mercury prize, the latter for Boy In Da Corner, a compelling but terrifying depiction of life on Britain's sink estates: a world of "blanks, skanks and street robbery". So Solid Crew and Mike Skinner's the Streets both made No 1. But Ms Dynamite's chart career was short-lived, while Skinner's attempt to expand on his success by signing other British rappers – including Example and Professor Green – to his label the Beats failed to garner much interest. "It just wasn't my time, neither me or Example were ready," Professor Green says. "Also, Mike had the best intentions, but he didn't know his head from his arse when it came to running a record label. It was run out of a shed in Chiswick, which was office, recording studio and toilet. It was wicked, we had some brilliant times, but it really showed me how not to do things."

By the time Tinchy Stryder turned up to perform at a club in Norwich in 2006, British rap was, as one of the club's promoters, Jack Foster, puts it, "on its arse". When Foster and his friend Archie Lamb offered to manage the rapper, he agreed: they had no experience but he had – literally – nothing to lose. "We saw massive potential to be a huge pop star," Foster says. "We thought, he's a good-looking young man, talented, a good rapper. We just thought rap music deserved to be big in Britain with home-grown artists, not just Americans."

What was needed, the pair decided, was "a non-threatening British urban artist". "I don't think we ever spoke to him about what lyrics he should write," Foster says, "but I think we definitely put him in with some more mainstream producers – we introduced him to people that he hadn't been around before – which maybe had an effect on what he wrote about."

The music industry noticeably failed to agree – "Pretty much every label told us it wasn't going to happen, they told us to give up, that there was nothing to be done with this kind of music" – but Dizzee Rascal clearly did: British rap's eureka moment, at least in commercial terms, came with the release of his 2008 single Dance Wiv Me, on which he ditched the unflinching inner-city reportage and the punishing, experimental electronics in favour of unashamed pop music with lyrics about nothing more threatening than pinching someone's girlfriend: "I'll feel like a wally if I don't pursue it." It was the first of four No 1 singles, over the course of which Dizzee Rascal reinvented himself: from a self-styled "problem for Anthony Blair" who occasionally wielded a knife in photos to a charming all-round entertainer, beloved of Prince Harry.

Those old enough to remember when British rap meant Derek B are probably also old enough to remember when doing that kind of thing would be accompanied by cries of sell-out. "[Dizzee Rascal] was ambitious, he wanted No 1 records," Nick Huggett says. "He made a conscious decision to move in that direction and you can't knock him for that. He was like, why the fuck do I have to make any more credible records? I want to be as big as McDonald's. He made it seem all right to make pop music, which made it possible for Tinie Tempah or Tinchy Stryder to make pop music. They didn't have to be about being aggressive or street. They celebrate success a lot in that world."

Within months, Tinchy Stryder not only had a record deal, but was at number three in the charts, having also ditched the stuff about guns and knives for something more radio-friendly. "The music got a bit more accessible," he says. "I realised there was a wider audience. The music that I started with was a bit more underground and hardcore. I don't know if they'd have liked it or not liked it – they never got the chance to hear it."

Pragmatic musical and lyrical changes aside, there may be other reasons for British rap's ongoing dominance. Wretch 32 points out that British rappers now tend to support each other. In the past, he thinks, "people were afraid", fiercely protective of their own success, scared there wasn't enough fame to go around. "Now everyone thinks, 'Well, I've got fans, you've got fans – if we come together, it could be a big deal.' Everyone sees who's coming through next and helps them out, tries to give them leverage. I think it was more competitive in the past." Which is certainly one way of describing the internecine, frequently violent feuding between artists that seemed commonplace a decade ago: when Dizzee Rascal was stabbed six times in Ayia Napa in 2003, persistent rumours connected the attack to his ongoing feud with So Solid Crew.

These days, he says, "Everyone's more professional." Foster agrees: "Definitely." He nods with the wry chuckle of a man who only booked Stryder for his club in the first place because his initial choice, Crazy Titch, had been jailed for murdering a producer during a row over some lyrics. "Tinchy, Tinie, Professor Green, Example – these are individuals focused on making music. You have to have a degree of sanity and focus if you're going to make it."

Foster thinks it helps that successful rappers now, as soon as they can, move out of the grim estates on which many of them grew up – at least some of the problems So Solid Crew encountered stemmed from the fact that many of its members carried on living on Battersea's notorious Winstanley Estate. "Above anything, it's dangerous for them," he says. "I've never lived in that environment myself, so I don't know the ins and outs, but as a manager, I think it's definitely important for them to find somewhere a bit out of that. And it's good for them to reap the rewards of their hard work. Rap's aspirational. It's always been about bettering yourself."

How long those rewards will be there is a matter of debate. They don't show any signs of going away in the immediate future. Recently, Foster and Lamb started shopping their latest protege, Dot Rotten, around the record labels: this time, no one told them to give up. Professor Green, however, worries that people already see UK rap as "a fad", that artists have been too craven in jumping on the pop bandwagon, that the whole thing isn't built to last. "People think, if I get this person to produce it, I can get a No 1 single. Well, what are you gonna do with your fucking album? When you gonna have any real say in what you do? Why do you sound so different from the way you did before you had a record deal? You were making hard music and now you're making some kind of saccharine fucking housey R&B rap fusion. Hip-hop began as party music – there's always room for that – but it needs to have some substance."

But for now there are more pressing things for Rizzle Kicks to ponder than the longevity of UK rap as a pop phenomenon. "People who used to think I was a little dickhead message me now on Facebook and want to be my mate," Stephens says when asked to reflect on the benefits of his new-found fame. "And girls. Especially girls who used to think I was a loser." He turns to Alexander-Sule. "They're chatting to me now, aren't they?"

His partner raises an eyebrow: "I'm trying to think of a more intelligent answer to that question than 'girls'," he says.

"Well, not girls particularly, but you know what I mean about people who didn't give a shit, seeing how they talk to me now?" Stephens smiles: "Success does weird things to the human psyche." Outside, one of the teenage girls taps on the window and gives an excited squeal.